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Laissez-faire capitalism
Laissez-faire is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are absent of any form of government intervention such as regulation, privileges, imperialism, tariffs and subsidies. As a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the following axioms: The individual is the basic unit in society. -
Vaqueros
The vaquero is a horse-mounted livestock herder of a tradition that originated on the Iberian Peninsula and extensively developed in Mexico from a methodology brought to Latin America from Spain. The vaquero became the foundation for the North American cowboy. -
Tammany Hall
Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was a New York City political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. -
Buffalo herds
Buffalo had dominated the Great Plains before white Americans moved in, and Native Americans had long lived off the buffalo while sustaining their population. -
The iron law of wages
The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. -
Bessemer Process
a steel-making process, now largely superseded, in which carbon, silicon, and other impurities are removed from molten pig iron by oxidation in a blast of air in a special tilting retort (a Bessemer converter ). -
The Sand Creek massacre
The Sand Creek massacre (also known as the Chivington massacre, the battle of Sand Creek or the massacre of Cheyenne Indians) was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army in the American Indian Wars that occurred on November 29, 1864, when a 675-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry -
Interstate Commerce Act 1866
The Interstate Commerce Act required that railroads charge fair rates to their customers and make those rates public. This legislation also created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which had the authority to investigate and prosecute companies who violated the law. -
Alaska Purchase
The Alaska Purchase was the United States' acquisition of Alaska from the Russian Empire. Alaska was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867, through a treaty ratified by the United States Senate and signed by President Andrew Johnson. -
Barbed wire
Barbed wire, also known as barb wire, occasionally corrupted as bobbed wire or bob wire, is a type of steel fencing wire constructed with sharp edges or points arranged at intervals along the strands. It is used to construct inexpensive fences and is used atop walls surrounding secured property. -
Time Zones
created after transcontinental railroad, shifts usually started at daybreak, railroad schedules needed a set time -
The Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement that arose among Western American Indians. It began among the Paiute in about 1869 with a series of visions of an elder, Wodziwob. These visions foresaw renewal of the Earth and help for the Paiute peoples as promised by their ancestors. -
Vertical Integration
the combination in one company of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies. -
Standard Oil
Standard Oil Co. Inc. was an American oil producing, transporting, refining, marketing company. Established in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler as a corporation in Ohio, it was the largest oil refiner in the world of its time -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is any of various theories of society which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, claiming to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. -
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a movement in Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, lack of unionization, poor schools, and the dangers of war. -
WCTU
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is an active international temperance organization that was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." -
Grange Movement
The Grange Movement, 1875. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 to advance methods of agriculture, as well as to promote the social and economic needs of farmers in the United States. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. Elisha Gray, 1876, designed a telephone using a water microphone in Highland Park, Illinois. ... Thomas Edison invented the carbon microphone which produced a strong telephone signal. -
Little Big Horn
The Battle of the Little Bighorn, also called Custer's Last Stand, marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The demise of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Indians as wild and bloodthirsty. -
RR strike 1877
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sometimes referred to as the Great Upheaval, began on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages for the third time in a year. -
Horizontal Integration
Horizontal integration is the process of a company increasing production of goods or services at the same part of the supply chain. A company may do this via internal expansion, acquisition or merger. The process can lead to monopoly if a company captures the vast majority of the market for that product or service. -
Tuskegee Institute
Tuskegee University is a private, historically black university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was established by Lewis Adams and Booker T. Washington. The campus is designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site by the National Park Service -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration law passed in 1882 that prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. It also excluded Chinese nationals from eligibility for United States citizenship. -
The Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration law passed in 1882 that prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. It also excluded Chinese nationals from eligibility for United States citizenship. -
Haymarket bombing
The Haymarket affair was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. -
AFL
The American Federation of Labor was a union of skilled laborers formed by Samuel Gompers in 1866. The AFL quickly became one of the most powerful unions in the United States. ... Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and led the AFL from 1886 until his death in 1924. -
Cattle Drive
A cattle drive is the process of moving a herd of cattle from one place to another, usually moved and herded by cowboys on horses. -
Wabash v Illinois
Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, 118 U.S. 557, also known as the Wabash Case, was a Supreme Court decision that severely limited the rights of states to control or impede interstate commerce. It led to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. -
Interstate Commerce
Interstate commerce, in U.S. constitutional law, any commercial transactions or traffic that cross state boundaries or that involve more than one state -
Sears, Roebuck
Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches, and established a mail-order business for watches and jewelry. -
Dawes Act 1887
Approved on February 8, 1887, "An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations," known as the Dawes Act, emphasized severalty, the treatment of Native Americans as individuals rather than as members of tribes. -
Gospel of Wealth
"Wealth", more commonly known as "The Gospel of Wealth", is an article written by Andrew Carnegie in June of 1889 that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich. The article was published in the North American Review, an opinion magazine for America's establishment. -
Hull House
Hull House was a settlement house in the United States that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Illinois, Hull House opened to recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had grown to 13 buildings. -
2nd Industrial Revolution
The Second Industrial Revolution was a period when advances in steel production, electricity and petroleum caused a series of innovations that changed society. With the production of cost effective steel, railroads were expanded and more industrial machines were built. -
Sherman Anti-trust Act 1890
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 is a United States antitrust law that regulates competition among enterprises, which was passed by Congress under the presidency of Benjamin Harrison. It is named for Sen. John Sherman, its principal author. -
The Wounded Knee Massacre
The Wounded Knee Massacre, also called the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a domestic massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians, almost half of whom were women and children, by soldiers of the United States Army. -
Ocala Platform of 1890
The "Demands" adopted by the Ocala convention called for the abolition of national banks; the establishment of sub-treasuries or depositories in every state, which would make low interest direct loans to farmers and property owners; the increase of money in circulation to not less than $50 per capita -
NAWSA
The National American Woman Suffrage Association was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. -
Forest Reserve Act 1891
The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 is a law that allowed the President of the United States to set aside forest reserves from the land in the public domain. This act passed by the United States Congress under Benjamin Harrison's administration. -
Plessy v Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal" -
Ellis Island
Ellis Island is a federally owned island in New York Harbor that contains a museum and former immigration inspection station. -
The Panic of 1893
The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893 and ended in 1897. It deeply affected every sector of the economy, and produced political upheaval that led to the realigning election of 1896 and the presidency of William McKinley. -
Pullman strike
Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894–c. July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June–July 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike. -
Forest Management Act 1897
The Organic Act of 1897 authorized establishment of National Forest Reserves to improve and protect the condition of forested areas of the United States and to "furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the people of the United States." Since then, a series of Acts have expanded -
US Steel
United States Steel Corporation, more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an American integrated steel producer headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with production operations in the United States and Central Europe. -
Angel Island
Angel Island is an island in San Francisco Bay. Originally the home of a military installation, the island now offers picturesque views of the San Francisco skyline, the Marin County Headlands and Mount Tamalpais. The entire island is included within Angel Island State Park, administered by California State Parks. -
Indian Wars
The American Indian Wars is the collective name for the various armed conflicts that were fought by European governments and colonists, and later by the governments and settlers, against various American Indian and First Nation tribes. -
American RR Association
The Association of American Railroads is an industry trade group representing primarily the major freight railroads of North America. Amtrak and some regional commuter railroads are also members. -
Commission
a form of city government where exectutive power is invested in a group of professional commissioners chosen for their skills and expertise.